By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

SUMMARYPhil Branigan’s “Provocative Syntax” offers a new theory of syntactic movementthat does away with (1) Extended Projection Principle (EPP) as a to-be-checkedfeature to motivate movement, and (2) Specifier (Spec) position in a phrase as aposition to be filled in. EPP was first introduced as the requirement that eachsentence have a subject and then was transformed into the requirement that eachhead have a Spec to be filled in.

The book contains a preface and five chapters. The first chapter is the“Introduction”. Chapter 2 is called “Provocation”, Chapter 3 “Provocative CaseStudies”, while 4 and 5 are “Force and Provocation” and “Provoking TraceDeletion”, respectively.

Chapter 1, Introduction, introduces Chomsky’s most recent theory of movement(Chomsky 2008), which has two components: an Agree relation between Probe-Goaland EPP. Branigan argues that EPP, as a representational constraint, inunnecessary to motivate movement.

Chapter 2, Provocation, gives the key proposal of the book. In Branigan’s theoryof movement, unlike Chomsky’s (2008), a separate copy is generated as a resultof the Agree between Probe and Goal. The key concept is provocation, whichgenerates a copy of the Goal whenever an Agree relation is established betweenProbe and Goal. This new copy forms a chain with the original copy and thenmerges in the root of the existing structure to ‘form a single phrase marker’.Thus, Branigan notes, there is no need to fill in a Specifier position. In thisview, movement is a side effect of creating a second copy of the Goal. Anuninterpretable feature is provocative if it requires an external match as wellas an internal match (i.e., one which is in its search domain). The externalmatch can be either a copy of the internal match or a separate item coming fromthe Numeration (wh-expletives in German). In any case, the external match andthe internal match form a chain since they agree with the same Probe.

In this chapter, Branigan also introduces the operation Refine, which turns anA’-chain into an operator-variable chain. Via this operation, the internal copygives up its operator content, and the external copy loses its predicationalcontent.

As to head movement, he first makes the assumption that the computational systemprefers phrasal movement to head movement, and that, therefore, head movement ispossible only in cases where phrasal movement is not. Head movement, then,occurs only in cases where the Goal is the head of the complement of the Probe,complement-to-Spec movement being illicit since a phrase cannot merge with thesame head more than once (Pesetsky & Torrego 2007). Since a head cannot mergein Spec, it adjoins to the Probe head.

In Chapter 3, Provocative Case Studies, Branigan documents cases where headmovement occurs instead of phrasal movement, and provides a derivation for thesecases under the provocation-based movement theory. One such case is Quotative Inversion in English:

1. “Who’s on first?” asked Abbott.

In these constructions, an operator (OP) moves to Tense Phrase (TP) since Tense(T) bears unvalued provocative OP features. Since OP externally merges in TP,Subject cannot merge in TP to value the unvalued phi-features of T. However,since agreement occurs between the v-V complex and Subject and this complexbears the relevant interpretable phi-features, the verbal complex moves to T.

Other constructions where head movement occurs because Subject cannot move areNegative Inversion constructions (2a-b), topicalization in Germanic (3), rootwh-questions (4) (where A’-movement and A-movement target the same phrase:Finiteness Phrase (FinP)), and German long topicalization (5):

2. a. No tastier moose stew have I ever sampled. b. Never would I support such an amendment.

In Chapter 4, Force and Provocation, Branigan gives the differences betweensymmetric and asymmetric Germanic languages with respect to A’-movement andprovides a provocation-based account of these differences. In symmetric Germaniclanguages, V2-phenomenon occurs not only with bridge verbs but also with abridgeverbs in embedded clauses as well as in relative clauses. In asymmetriclanguages, V2-phenomenon is restricted only to bridge verbs.He also provides examples of cases where a probe provokes multiple elements (twophrases or one phrase and one head). One such case is multiple wh-fronting inSlavic. In these cases, he proposes, the relevant functional heads are[+multiple provocative], i.e. they can provoke multiple elements. In the othercase, both a head and phrase within its complement move to the head andspecifier positions of a higher phrase, respectively. This gives us thederivation of embedded wh-questions in asymmetric Germanic languages.

For Branigan, the main difference between symmetric and asymmetric Germaniclanguages depends on the base position of complementizers: complementizers mergein Force position in symmetric Germanic languages and in Finiteness (Fin)position, as a reflection of interpretable [force] ([iforce]) features of thishead, in asymmetric Germanic languages. In asymmetric Germanic languages, bothFin and the wh-phrase (and relative operators in relative clauses), both with[iforce] features, move to ForceP, which is [+ multiple provocative]. Insymmetric Germanic languages (Yiddish, Icelandic), on the other hand, only thewh-phrase moves to ForceP but Fin cannot because it does not bear [iforce]features. Branigan also suggests a similar analysis for Subjects and Topics inthese languages: Topics and Subjects both move to Spec, FinP; however, in eachinstance, Fin has different feature specifications.

As to the distribution of embedded V2 clauses, he gives a provocation-basedaccount: when there is an intervening phrase (and its head) between ForceP andFinP, Force cannot provoke Fin since head movement is blocked, and thederivation crashes.

The central argument of Chapter 5, Provoking Trace Deletion, is that syntacticstructure produces operator-variable chains, leaving minimal amount of work forthe interface.In the following example,

6. . . . FcP[ which tent Fc [ the bike was traded for]] (p. 120)

the movement chain includes the provoking Force head and two distinct copies of ‘which tent’:

7. (which tent(1), Force, which tent(2)) (p. 120)

For LF to interpret this chain, certain structure is deleted, providing thefollowing:

8. (WH x, DP[ D[ x ] N[ tent ]]) (p. 120)

After deletion, the second member of the chain provides the variable.

In the rest of the chapter, he focuses on that-trace effects as well as on howintermediary copies in successive-cyclic A’-movement are interpreted underRefine: intermediary copies of a phrase, that function as operator, aredeleted/ignored under his Clause Edge Interpretation Convention:

9. Clause Edge Interpretation Convention (CEIC) In the left periphery of a clause, only categories external to aforce marker can be ignored. (p. 127)

That-trace effects are instances of failure of deletion of these intermediarycopies in A’-movement. In the following example (7a, p. 125), the intermediarycopy of the wh-phrase occurs to the left of the force marker ‘that’ (10b) and,therefore, can be ignored:

Since CEIC cannot ignore the copy of the wh-phrase to the right of ‘that’, thederivation crashes.

EVALUATIONAll in all, Branigan’s book is a great achievement in that it accounts for avast set of phenomena from different languages, especially Germanic languages.It is a study that researchers and students working in the framework theMinimalist Program needs to read. The work puts forward quite challenging ideassuch as (i) elimination of EPP, (ii) copies as distinct elements (tokens),elimination of Specifier (Spec) position as a position-to-be-filled-in, amongothers. It also gives a very neat theory of head movement in Narrow Syntax. Inow point out one implication and a few problematic aspects of Branigan’s theory.

One aspect of the theory presented in the book is that Specifier positions arenot positions that need to be filled in and, therefore, motivate movement. Theyare rather created as a result of the movement operation. In a sense, thiseliminates the difference between movement (to Spec) and adjunction in terms ofphrase structural representation. In adjunction, neither is there a position tobe filled in. Nor is it required to assume that adjunction creates segments. Italso eliminates the question ‘Why is Spec always leftward?’, requiring a newexplanation for why A-movement and A’-movement are leftward.

However, Branigan’s theory has some wrinkles with respect to theta-roleassignment. In the case of A-movement, Branigan assumes that theta-roleassignment can occur at two levels: Narrow Syntax (NS) and Logical Form (LF)(see the discussion on p. 16). This is a non-minimalistic assumption andreminiscent of a similar problem with Government-Binding theory: in GB the sametheta role was assigned to the DP member of an expletive-associate chain in DeepStructure (DS) and then to the chain itself in Logical Form (LF), for instance(Brody, 1993).

As to expletive-associate chains in partial wh-movement in Germanic languages,Branigan contends that the wh-expletive in a higher position is pronouncedbecause it is not homophonous with its associate. Under this view, if there ismore than one wh-expletive in a structure, only one of them is supposed to bepronounced. However, the data shows the opposite (ex. 12). Therefore, hisanalysis requires some refinement with respect to (conditions on) which membersof a chain can be pronounced in PF:

12. Was glaubst du was er sagt wen Irina liebt? what believe you what he says who Irina loves ‘Who do you believe that he says that Irina loves?’ (p. 18)

Also, in his theory, A-movement occurs due to the provocative unvaluedphi-features of the Probe, EPP being eliminated. However, in the following datafrom Catalan, Fin agrees with a Nominative object when the Dative Experiencersits in Spec, FinP (ex. 13); similarly, Fin agrees with a Nominative Object whenthe Subject is non-Nominative in Icelandic (ex. 14):

Under Branigan’s theory, it is unclear what motivates movement of non-NominativeSubjects to the canonical Subject position. If it were phi-features, Fin wouldnot be expected to agree with the object. I believe his theory will be muchneater if he develops an analysis for the puzzling data above.

Fortuny, Jordi. 2008. The Emergence of Order in Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Pesetsky, David and Esther Torrego. 2007. The syntax of valuation and theinterpretability of features. In S. Karimi, V. Samiian, and W. Wilkins, eds.,Phrasal and Clausal Architecture: Syntactic Derivation and Interpretation,262-294. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Atakan İnce is a freelance linguist and translator. He received his PhD in
linguistics from the University of Maryland. His research interests are in
ellipsis and agreement in Turkish within a generative framework.